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Picador
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«From the author of «The Swimming-Pool Library» comes a perfectly realized evocation of a very particular world in a very particular time. It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend and his uneasy responsibility. At the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty — a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.» |
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«Twenty-five years on from «Less Than Zero», we pick up again with Clay. In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with «Less Than Zero», his «extraordinarily accomplished first novel» («New Yorker»), successfully chronicling the frightening consequences of unmitigated hedonism within the ranks of the ethically bereft youth of 80s Los Angeles. Twenty-five years later, Ellis returns to those same characters — to Clay and the band of infamous teenagers whose lives weave sporadically through his — but now, they face an even greater period of disaffection: their own middle age. Clay seems to have moved on — he's become a successful screenwriter — but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his vulnerable former girlfriend, is now married to Trent — still a bisexual philanderer — and their Beverly Hills parties attract excessive levels of fame and fortune. Clay's childhood friend Julian is a recovering addict running an ultra-discreet, high-class escort service, and their old dealer Rip, reconstructed and face-lifted nearly beyond recognition, is involved in activities far more sinister than those of his notorious past. After a meeting with a gorgeous but talentless actress determined to win a role in his movie, Clay finds himself connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town. As his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal leads him to be drawn further and further into this ominous case it looks like he will face far more serious consequences than ever before.» |
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A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, 'Black' and 'White', as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. 'The Sunset Limited grips from the very first page.' Financial Times 'The author at his best, meditating on life, suffering and religion' Shortlist 'It's remarkable that Cormac McCarthy could revive the antique genre of the philosophical dialogue as convincingly as he does here. His prose bites.' Evening Standard. |
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«This is Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since «The Line of Beauty», winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in «The Line of Beauty», his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, «The Stranger's Child» is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.» |
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This title introduces Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev, and an outstanding new voice in historical crime fiction... It's Moscow, 1936 and Stalin's Great Terror is beginning. In a deconsecrated Church, a young woman is found dead, her mutilated body displayed on the altar for all to see. Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia is asked to investigate. But when he discovers that the victim is an American citizen, the NKVD — the most feared organisation in Russia — becomes involved. As more bodies are discovered and the pressure from above builds, Korolev begins to question who he can trust; and who, in this Russia where fear, uncertainty and hunger prevails, are the real criminals. Soon, Korolev will find not only his moral and political ideals threatened, but also his life... |
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'Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like 'certain death' and 'total failure' and the idea of 'a doomed generation'. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes'. Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner for the last two years. Those columns are collected here to offer a chronicle of the adventures of a Generation of Swine. The incomparable 'Dr Gonzo' has journeyed no small distance in search of intelligent life and reports back, instead, on the demented state of current events. He keeps tabs on the 1998 presidential race, quotes from the Bible (reference books in hotel rooms are supplied exclusively by the Gideons) and asks why the President appears to be a hundred and twenty-eight years old. 'He is working from a dementia that no one in his right mind would want to share. It is the dementia, however, that makes Thompson great' — Playboy. 'His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest' — Nelson Algren. |
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Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom — doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream. |
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One midsummer's day in Arden, the Godley family gather at their dying father's bedside, a collection of troubled individuals and fraying relationships. The gods, those mischievous spirits, look on silently; unable to resist intervening, they spy, tease and seduce their mortal playthings. Old Adam Godley's time on earth seems to be running out, and his mind runs to disquieting memories. Little does he realize, as he lies mute but alert in the Sky Room, what mischief the gods are capable of. Overflowing with a bawdy humour, and a deep and refreshing clarity of insight, The Infinities is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a delicately poised, infinitely wise look at the terrible and wonderful plight of being human. In electrifying prose, Banville captures the aching intensity, the magic and enchantment, of a single midsummer's day in Arden. |
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'A novel that is both slight and profound, a distilled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the twenty-first century' Observer The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to. As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating expose of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion. 'A masterly portrait of the impact of death on those who live' Evening Standard. |
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«'A brilliant excursion into the decadence of contemporary culture' — «Sunday Times». Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target... An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's «Bonfire» or Ellis' «Psycho», «Cosmopolis» is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized. 'A prose-poem about New York... DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading... we ignore him at our peril' — Blake Morrison, «Guardian».» |
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'Nobody, it seems, could write better than this. No one could have a clearer vision of the micro-circuitry of post-modern life' Evening Standard Ostensibly, DeLillo's blackly comic second novel is about Gary Harkness, a football player and student at Logos College, west Texas. During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly fixated on the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as generals might contemplate global conflict. But as the terminologies of football and nuclear war the language of end zones become interchanged, the polysemous nature of words emerges, and DeLillo forces us to see beyond the sterile reality of substitution. This clever and playful novel is a timeless and topical study of human beings' obsession with conflict and confrontation. 'Powerfully funny, oblique, testy, and playful, tearing along in dazzling cinematic spurts... A masterful novel' Washington Post. |
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'A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic' Geoff Dyer, Sunday Telegraph Underworld opens famously at the Dodgers Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling. DeLillo loosely follows the fate of the winning baseball as the book swells and rolls through time. He offers a panoramic vision of America, defined by the overarching conflict of the cold war. This is an awe-inspiring story, seen in deep, clear detail, of men and women, together and apart, as they search for meaning, survival and connection in the toughest of times. 'A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest... In Underworld we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers' William Boyd, Observer. |
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Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. He lives in Manhattan. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful day in his life. When he woke up, he didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut. As his stretch limousine moves across town, his world begins to fall apart. But more worrying than the loss of his fortune is the realization that his life may be under threat. |
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A magnificent, essential work of fiction about the event that defines turn-of-the-twenty-first-century America, from the award-winning author of White Noise, Libra and Underworld. FALLING MAN begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and follows the aftermath in the intimate lives of a few individuals. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. This is the inner seam of history, a novel that traces the way the events of September 11 reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, cathartic. |
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In the sweet shop Willy Chapman was free, absolved from all responsibility, and he ran his sweet shop like his life — quietly, steadfastly, devotedly. It was a bargain struck between Chapman and his beautiful, emotionally injured wife — a bargain based on unexpressed, inexpressible love and on a courageous acceptance of life's deprivation... threatened only by Dorry, their clever, angry, unforgiving daughter. |
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1940: The Spanish Civil War is over, and Madrid lies ruined, while the Germans continue their relentless march through Europe. And as Britain stands alone, General Franco considers whether to abandon neutrality and enter the war. Into this uncertain world comes Harry Brett: ex-public schoolboy, traumatised veteran of Dunkirk and, now, reluctant spy for the British Secret Service. Sent to gain the confidence of Sandy Forsyth, an old schoolfriend turned shady Madrid businessman, he finds himself involved in a dangerous game — and surrounded by memories. Meanwhile Sandy's girlfriend, ex-Red Cross nurse Barbara Clare, is engaged on a secret mission of her own — to find her former lover... |
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